Links for January 14th through January 15th

A little something extra…

(Though I reviewed this book over on my personal blog awhile back, I thought I’d bring it over here as it’s certainly applicable.)

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior – a review

As with most pattern books, this is one you flip through in an hour and then save it to refer back to. The strength of software management and development pattern books is describing problems that commonly occur, not really telling you how to fix them. Thus, they tend to be frustrating because you’re left thinking, “how am I going to get this to work in my organization?” There is a certain level of detail in some of these patterns that’s refreshing, but most are just brief outlines of a software management or team-work problem.

Still, they’re extremely helpful things to keep in mind which you may be forgetting (“The Empty Chair”) or no longer think applies to you (“Young Pups Old Dogs”), helpful advice if you must do it (“Offshore Follies”), to some that can be reduced to a clever quip, as in “War Room” where DeMarco says, “I’m beginning to think that a project not worth a war room may be a project not worth doing. ”There’s solid advice in here, but the 0th pattern is “Be humble: never assume you have this stuff figured out.” After that, many of them are extremely good advice.

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, be sure to check me out over in Goodreads.

The Links

• IBM grabs largest enterprise cloud deployment
• Lotus to set road map for free productivity suite
• Google's Memo to CIOs
• Apple Has Hired an M&A Specialist? What’s Adobe's Market Cap, Again? [Digital Daily]
• How Hadoop startup Cloudera is evolving
• IBM to unveil deep, broad cloud strategy at Lotusphere
• New HP and Microsoft agreement commits $50 million less than similar 2006 deal
  Nice post from Tim as always: "I can’t shake off the thought that since HP wants to carry on selling us servers, and Microsoft wants to carry on selling us licences for Windows and Office, the two are engaged in disguised cloud avoidance. Take Office Web Apps in Office 2010 for example: good enough to claim the online document editing feature; bad enough to keep us using locally installed Office."
• Big Blue rides Schooner to MySQL boost
  Accelerate your MySQL for $45,000.
• CloudCamp for Haiti: How the Cloud Can Help Aid Efforts
• When will the crowd turn against private cloud?
  "So when I talk about ‘private cloud’ as something the world will move on from, I’m not talking about cloud infrastructure that’s logically partitioned to make it private. I’m talking about physically private infrastructure that’s logically structured as though it were cloud."
• Spiceworks: We're Nearly Profitable | MSPmentor
• Cisco powers through recession, bets big on video
• LegalCloud: Managed Services Meet the Legal Vertical
• Pablo Castro's blog : HTML5 does databases
  What one Microsofty is thinking about when it comes to HTML 5 and databases.
• Leadership By Numbers :: Lotusphere is going to be weirdly different.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.